Summary

The unlikely story of one of the oddest monuments in American history, its obsessive mastermind, and our misguided attempts to create an American heritage.. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, hoped that ten thousand years from now, when archaeologists came upon the four sixty-foot presidential heads carved in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they would have a clear and graphic understanding of American civilization. Borglum, the child of Mormon polygamists, had an almost Ahab-like obsession with Colossalism-a scale that matched his ego and the era. He learned how to be a celebrity from Auguste Rodin; how to be a political bully from Teddy Roosevelt. He ran with the Ku Klux Klan and mingled with the rich and famous from Wall Street to Washington. Mount Rushmore was to be his crowning achievement, the newest wonder of the world, the greatest piece of public art since Phidias carved the Parthenon. But like so many episodes in the saga of the American West, what began as a personal dream had to be bailed out by the federal government, a compromise that nearly drove Borglum mad. Nor in the end could he control how his masterpiece would be received. Nor its

Author Notes

Publisher's Weekly Review

On page one of this history of Mt. Rushmore, Taliaferro proposes to answer "the questions that any archaeologist would ask": Who are the men represented, how were they chosen, how were they carved, by whom, who visits this shrine? In the end, this overly modest mission statement is the only false note in an impressive work. Like the outsized sculptures blasted out of a granite mountainside, this history, by a former Newsweek editor, is massive, descriptive yet never blandly representational and filled with characters as fully realized as the Mt. Rushmore busts. The central figure is Rushmore's "father"-sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941), a fascinating study in contradictions: a great talent, but a hopeless businessman; a patriot who was also a bigot; a family man who lied about his parentage and ditched his first, much older wife to marry a younger woman who could bear children. Taliaferro (Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs) also uses the story of a monument as a springboard from which to explore the tensions within the American dream: an empire built on slave labor and on land stolen from the Indians; reverence for the common man combined with an infatuation with larger-than-life heroes; a love of the landscape that often takes a backseat to the quest for profit. Like Borglum, Taliaferro set himself a Sisyphean task and has produced a work that is both inspiring and thought provoking. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal Review

Gutzon Borglum conceived and mostly executed one of the most monumental sculptures of the 20th century: the faces of four presidents carved into rock in South Dakota. These faces have kept the Black Hills alive in the minds of a generally accepting American public and served as a sometime provocation, sometime source of amused financial opportunity for the Lakota Sioux. Taliaferro (Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs) reconstructs the project's history and examines Lakota-white relations and larger questions of racial identities. This book is almost identical in subject and scope to Jesse Lancher's recent Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered, and it is as good but no better, which means that both are worth acquiring by public and academic libraries alike. Taliaferro's is the more conventional history, Lancher's the livelier travelog.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Choice Review

This historical biography with a dose of aesthetic critique framed by travelogue focuses on sculptor Gutzon Borglum's obsessive quest to shape Mount Rushmore into a national memorial. Initially, readers learn something about the Black Hills, their importance to Native peoples, and their preemption by the US. As the story unfolds, readers meet Borglum--egomaniac artist, political grandstander, and common conman, driven to win commissions for heroic statues and sculptures. Always short of funds, always racing the clock, and forever procrastinating, one wonders how he ever accomplished any of the commissions he won, or even why he won them. The book also describes the US art scene in which he operated at the turn of the century, and which he disdained, and the political and technical requirements of actually carving the faces of the book's title. The author concludes with commentary on the continuing saga of Native peoples' attempts to retrieve lost lands. The book is for general readers--entertaining reading with occasional flinty insights, but without the critical edge of an academic work. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General collections, public libraries. J. S. Wood University of Southern Maine